Rainer Brüninghaus, Manfred Schoof

Shadows & Smiles is a duo album by the trumpeter and flugelhornist Manfred Schoof and the pianist Rainer Brüninghaus, six pieces of which each wrote three. Schott's text likens the music to pastel drawings crossed by dissonant, polytonal lines, over a gently pulsing current of sound. It evokes, in the label's words, the quiet beauty of untouched landscapes at dusk.

Schoof was born in Magdeburg on 6 April 1936; Brüninghaus was born in Bad Pyrmont on 21 November 1949. While studying sociology in Cologne from 1968 to 1972, Brüninghaus founded the experimental jazz-rock band Eiliff. He then played in Volker Kriegel's Spectrum, and in 1975 began a seven-year collaboration with Eberhard Weber in the group Colours, with Charlie Mariano. In the same period he was already working with Schoof, duo concerts included. In 1984 his ECM album Continuum won the German Record Critics' Award, and from 1988 he toured the world with Jan Garbarek.

The album was recorded in October 1987 and May 1988 at Tonstudio Cornet in Cologne, with Thomas Kern as engineer, and the two musicians produced it themselves. The cover reproduces Udaipur 1988, a painting by Manfred Scharpf. Schoof's pieces are Smiles, Sequence and Ingredience of the Blues; Brüninghaus wrote Shadows, Fire Side and Suggestion. They alternate on the disc, and most run long: Sequence lasts nearly thirteen minutes and Fire Side almost twelve. Brüninghaus plays acoustic piano and keyboards, so the duo can set the trumpet or the softer flugelhorn against a bed of electronic sound as well as the piano. A line quoted on the Schott page, "Calm and freedom are the greatest goods", sums up the unhurried pace.

Schoof had recorded free jazz in the 1960s, including European Echoes, released in 1969. Here the approach is quieter and more lyrical, based on long themes and on the interplay of two players who had worked together since the 1970s. Brüninghaus's own writing, by his account, joins the ideals of classical music with the spontaneity of jazz. The album appeared in the WERGO Colours series.

CD, Wergo WER 80007-50, first issued in 1989, total time 57:45.